Welcome to the 70th edition of the Emoji Wrap newsletter! March has been a busy month for new emojis worldwide, with support for Emoji 17.0 rolling out across both Apple and Android devices in recent weeks (Apple’s newest designs are shown above). 🍎✨
Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 26.4, officially introducing its Emoji 17.0 designs just over two weeks after the designs debuted in a developer beta. Following that beta release, several media outlets noted the new Distorted Face emoji’s resemblance to imagery from Apple’s controversial 2024 “Crush” iPad Pro ad, in which a rubber emoji toy (amongst other objects) is compacted by an industrial press. 🗜️😳
Inspiration or coincidence? It’s difficult to say. The original proposal (submitted under the name Inflatable Face) makes no reference to this comparison, and while a subsequent blog post from proposer Jennifer Daniel (Chairperson of the Unicode Emoji Standard & Research Working Group and a Creative Director at Google) does briefly reference the ad, it focuses on longstanding visual tropes in cartoons, comics, classical art, and photography. 🎨📸
As noted above, Apple is not the only platform to gain Emoji 17.0 support this month. Google’s designs have now shipped to Android devices via an Android 16 update, following their initial reveal in font updates last September. WhatsApp also rolled out support earlier this month via a recent Android update, while Samsung introduced its set through One UI 8.5, though availability remains limited to a small number of devices. 📲🔜
Since our last newsletter, the draft candidate list for Emoji 18.0 has also been updated ahead of its expected approval later this year. Notably, the proposed Face With Squinting Eyes has been removed, while a new Cracking Face has been put forward in its place. 📋🔄
Around the same time, we published an in-depth design convergence review spanning 2018 to 2026, revisiting Jeremy Burge’s prediction that 2018 would mark the beginning of broader emoji design cohesion across platforms and assessing how that trend has evolved. 🖼️🔍
Rounding out this 70th edition of Emoji Wrap: the debut of community creations in the Emojipedia sticker archives, X’s recent redesign of the Iranian flag emoji, emojis closing out an episode of SNL, new research in Nature on emoji-based sarcasm, and an invitation to participate in a new emoji study from Prof. Linda Kaye’s Team Emoji. 🧑🔬📊
Emoji Wrap
✨ New Emojis
🍎🆕 Apple iOS 26.4 Emoji Changelog
As part of the public release of iOS 26.4, Apple has introduced designs for 163 new emojis, all from Unicode’s Emoji 17.0 list of recommendations. The update also includes a revision to the 🇵🇷 Puerto Rican flag emoji.
Here we discuss this update in detail, honing in on the response to the Distorted Face as well as making observations regarding the new 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancers and the “Bigfoot”-inspired Hairy Creature emojis.
🟢🗨️ WhatsApp 2.26.8.72 Emoji Changelog
Earlier in March, WhatsApp began rolling version 2.26.8.72 for its Android app. This update introduces support for the Emoji 17.0 recommendations and revised the designs of a small number of already-available emojis, such as the 🐦⬛ Black Bird and 🥧 Pie.
📰 News
📋🔄 2026/2027 Emoji List Has Changed
The draft list of emoji recommendations for Emoji 18.0 was revised following a recommendation from the Unicode Emoji Standard & Research Working Group.
The proposed Face With Squinting Eyes was removed from the list and its provisionally assigned code point reassigned to a newly proposed Cracking Face emoji.
🎨🖼️ Community-Created Stickers Now Live on Emojipedia
Earlier this month, Emojipedia expanded our Emoji Sticker Generator with a first for the site: publicly available, user-generated stickers. Users in select regions can now directly contribute to the Public Sticker Archives first unveiled during last year’s World Emoji Day.
For the first time, anyone can browse, download, and share community-created emoji stickers from across the web.
☀️🦁 X Updates Its Iranian Flag Emoji Design
In case you missed it, in January the social platform X (fka Twitter) updated its 🇮🇷 Flag: Iran emoji design to display the historic Lion and Sun design: a symbol used on Iran’s flag before the 1979 revolution, now associated with the Iranian opposition and diaspora.
X implemented this change unilaterally within its own app on Apple and Windows devices, without collaboration with those vendors. The update followed a public exchange with X’s Head of Product, Nikita Bier, and marked the platform’s first documented emoji update since its 2024 revisions to the 🔫 Pistol emoji.
Here we discuss the change as well as providing an overview of how flag emojis work from a technical perspective.
❤️🚡 SNL’s Weekend Update Features Red Heart and Aerial Tramway Emojis
On March 14, Saturday Night Live (SNL) featured a Weekend Update appearance from the ❤️ Red Heart emoji (Marcello Hernández) and the 🚡 Aerial Tramway emoji (Mikey Day).
Ostensibly invited to discuss the new Apple emoji update that we discussed above, the two instead took the segment on a detour through some of the world’s most popular and most obscure emojis.
💭 Interesting
🖼️🔍 Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018 - 2026
Just under eight years ago, we here at Emojipedia hypothesized that 2018 would be a year of emoji design convergence, with various major emoji vendors’ designs being revised to be much closer in composition to one another.
Here, we look back at the major emoji updates made since early 2018, covering both moves toward design convergence as well as some recent instances of purposeful design divergence.
🙄🧑🔬 An Emoji-centric Approach to Sarcasm Detection in Online Discourse
Published in Nature earlier this year, this academic paper examines the role of emojis in detecting sarcasm in online text, looking at emoji sentiment, frequency, and position within a post. The authors found that emojis can reliably signal sarcasm even without any other contextual modality.
🤲🔬 Establishing Sensorimotor Norms for Emoji
Prof. Linda Kaye’s Team Emoji is collecting data for a new study exploring the physical and bodily associations people make with different emojis. You can contribute via the link above.
🤗 Lastly
That does it for our latest edition of the Emoji Wrap! 🌯📯
As always, for all the latest emoji news and analysis, you can follow Emojipedia on X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
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